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      Jamie Raskin derides 'explosive and deranged' tactics of Trump lawyers

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      The architect of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has blamed “explosive and deranged” tactics by the former president’s lawyers for obscuring the strength of the case presented by House Democrats.But the lead impeachment manager, Jamie Raskin, said the Democrats’ case appeared nevertheless to convince even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Trump’s guilt in inciting the Capitol riot.Two days after Trump escaped conviction, and as his supporters reveled in the prospect of his return to frontline politics, Raskin also told the Washington Post it was both “good and terrible to watch” McConnell’s post-verdict speech in which he excoriated Trump – but said he had voted to acquit because the trial was unconstitutional.It was telling, Raskin said, that many of the 43 Republicans who voted to acquit “felt the need to hang their hats” on that argument, which was rejected by constitutional scholars and twice by the Senate itself.Not even Trump’s lawyers attempted to defend what Democrats characterized as Trump’s “big lie”: that he won an election he actually lost by more than 7m popular votes and 74 electoral votes.They couldn’t get a summer internship with My Cousin VinnyNor did Trump’s legal team, led by a personal injury lawyer and a former county prosecutor who declined to pursue charges against Bill Cosby, succeed in freeing Trump from blame for the attack on the Capitol, judging by Republican senators’ speeches.Instead, Trump’s lawyers denied a copious and unambiguous record of what the former president said and did, while drawing false parallels between routine political speech and Trump’s coup attempt.In the final vote of the impeachment trial, seven Republicans voted with Democrats to convict Trump – a 53-vote tally 10 short of the total required.In an indication of how the Republican party has diverged from the popular will, almost six in 10 Americans – 58% – believe Trump should have been convicted, according to a new ABC News-Ipsos poll.Raskin and his fellow House managers were widely praised for their work. Their case featured extensive use of video of events at the Capitol on 6 January, when supporters told by Trump to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat broke in, some hunting lawmakers to kidnap or kill. Five people died as a direct result of the riot.Raskin took on the lead role despite his son having killed himself in December. He told the Post he “told managers we were going to make a lawyerly case but would not censor the emotion”.There has been criticism among Democrats, after the managers persuaded the Senate to vote to call witnesses but then agreed to avoid that step, which could have lengthened the trial. On Sunday, Raskin said witnesses would not have changed any minds.“These Republicans voted to acquit in the face of this mountain of un-refuted evidence,” he told NBC. “There’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult.”The Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett, also widely praised for her role in the trial, told CNN: “We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines.”[embedded content]More evidence of Trump’s alleged wrongdoing may yet be unearthed. Members of Congress from both parties have called for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate why government officials and law enforcement failed to stop the attack on the Capitol.Trump lawyers Michael van der Veen, Bruce Castor and David Schoen celebrated their client’s acquittal but faced widespread ridicule for a case built on flimsy arguments about freedom of speech and scattershot whataboutism concerning Democratic attitudes to protests against racism and police brutality.“They couldn’t get a summer internship with My Cousin Vinny,” Raskin told the Post, perhaps a deliberate reference to a bizarre and famously sweaty press conference given in November by another Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, amid the former president’s failed attempts to prove mass fraud in his election defeat by Joe Biden.My Cousin Vinny is an Oscar-winning 1992 comedy about a hapless lawyer played by Joe Pesci. Giuliani said it was his “one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn”.Trump, who comes from Queens, refused to testify in his own defence. Raskin called him “a profile in absolute cowardice” and said: “He betrayed the constitution, the country and his people.“Trump’s followers need to understand he has no loyalty to them … Donald Trump is the past. We need to deal with the future.” More

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      in US Politics

      US lawmakers call for 9/11-style commission to investigate Capitol riot

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      Democratic and Republican lawmakers have issued fresh calls for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate why government officials and law enforcement failed to stop the attack on the US Capitol in January, following Donald Trump’s acquittal in his impeachment on charges that he incited the insurrection.The commission would be modeled after a panel created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, which reviewed what caused the atrocity and laid out recommendations on how to foresee and prevent any future incursions.“We need a 9/11 commission to find out what happened and make sure it never happens again, and I want to make sure that the Capitol footprint can be better defended next time,” said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator of South Carolina and close Trump ally who voted to acquit the former president on Saturday. “His behavior after the election was over the top,” Graham said of the former president on Fox News Sunday.Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware agreed. Speaking on ABC’s This Week, he said that a bipartisan commission would “make sure we secure the Capitol going forward and that we lay bare the record of just how responsible and how abjectly violating of his constitutional oath Trump really was”.Using harrowing video footage from the day, Democratic House prosecutors laid out their case that the former president stoked the attack with violent rhetoric and dangerous insistence on the debunked conspiracy theories suggesting he had won the 2020 presidential election, against all evidence that he had, in fact, lost.Seven Republicans joined 50 Democrats in the Senate to hold Trump responsible for inciting the deadly insurrection, led by armed supporters who announced intentions to kill or harm lawmakers including Mike Pence, the former-vice president, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker.Though the result of the trial was the most bipartisan in history, House managers ultimately did not secure the 67 votes required to convict Trump.But an independent commission could be another way for both Republicans and Democrats to hold Trump accountable. Other investigations have already been planned, with two Senate committees set to investigate security failures during the riots. In the House, Pelosi has also asked for a review of the Capitol’s security process.“There should be a complete investigation about what happened,” said Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator of Louisiana who has been censured by fellow Republicans in his home state for voting in favor of conviction.A commission would reveal “what was known, who knew it and when they knew, all that, because that builds the basis so this never happens again”, Cassidy told ABC, adding that he was “attempting to hold President Trump accountable” with his vote in the trial.Even Republicans who found Trump “not guilty” with their vote have tried to distance themselves from the former president. Most notably, the senate’s Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said: “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”McConnell, who insisted that he voted against impeachment because Trump was no longer in office, after refusing to hold the trial while Trump was still in office, statements on Saturday seemed to punt the responsibility of holding Trump responsible to civil courts: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”Prior to the impeachment vote, Pelosi wrote a letter to her Democratic colleagues saying it is “clear that we will need to establish a 9/11-type commission to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack on January 6”. She renewed her support for the commission after Trump’s acquittal.A commission on the Capitol riot would need to be approved via legislation like the 9/11 commission was, and lawmakers may ultimately disagree on who should sit on it. Still, the idea has been gaining steam.“For the first time in however many years, we had an insurrection incited by the president of the United States where five people died, more have died since, hundreds were injured, people lost fingers, lost eyesight,” said Madeleine Dean, one of the House impeachment managers, said on ABC.“Of course there must be a full commission, an impartial commission, not guided by politics, filled with people who would stand up to the courage of their conviction,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      Democrats defend decision not to call witnesses as tactic under scrutiny

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      Democrats defended their prosecution of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Sunday and hinted at the possibility of criminal charges, after failing to convince enough senators the former president was guilty of inciting the deadly Capitol attack.The 57-43 vote for a conviction, which fell short of the two-thirds majority required, was still the biggest bipartisan impeachment vote in US history and amounted to “a complete repudiation” of Trump’s conduct, lead House manager Jamie Raskin insisted. Seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote with every Democratic and independent senator after the five-day trial.But the tactics of Raskin and his team have come under scrutiny, with some Democrats asking if the decision not to seek witness testimony, after senators voted early on the trial’s final day to allow it, was a mistake.Specifically, evidence was not heard from the Washington congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler about a call between Trump and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy during the 6 January riot showing that the president would not call off his supporters.“Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election theft than you are,” Beutler said Trump replied when the House minority leader pleaded for him to recall the mob who overran the Capitol in support of the president’s false claims of a stolen election.On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the question of whether to call witnesses sparked lengthy debate among the House managers, who ultimately agreed to a deal to accept Beutler’s statement as a written record. The decision diverted the likelihood of the trial extending days, if not weeks as both sides deposed witnesses.“I know that people are feeling a lot of angst, and believe that maybe if we had this, the senators would have done what we wanted,” Stacey Plaskett, a congressional delegate from the Virgin Islands and impeachment team member, told CNN’s State of the Union.“We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines. We believe that we proved the case, we proved the elements of the article of impeachment. It’s clear that these individuals were hardened, that they did not want to let the [former] president be convicted, or disqualified.”Raskin concurred.“These Republicans voted to acquit in the face of this mountain of unrefuted evidence,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “There’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult.”Among the 43 senators to vote to acquit Trump was Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who nonetheless followed his “not guilty” vote with a fiery and contradictory post-trial speech on the Senate floor, in which he condemned Trump for a “disgraceful dereliction of duty”.“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said. “No question about it.”“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” the Kentucky Republican added, raising the prospect of criminal charges for the 45th US president over the riot. “He didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”Neither Raskin nor Madeleine Dean, an impeachment manager who told ABC’s This Week McConnell was “speaking out of two sides of his mouth”, ruled out criminal prosecution for Trump, saying the decision would be up to others.Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland and a frequent Trump critic, went further.“There was yesterday’s vote, but there’s still a number of potential court cases that I think he’s still going to face, in criminal courts and the court of public opinion,” he told CNN. “This is not over and we’re going to decide over the next couple of years what the fate of Donald Trump and the Republican party is.”Prosecutors in Georgia are investigating calls by Trump and an ally, Lindsey Graham, in which state Republican officials were pressured to overturn Biden’s victory.Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, said Trump’s acquittal proved he was still firmly in charge of the Republican party, and that trial witnesses would not have swayed any more senators.“They weren’t going to get any more Republican votes than they had and I think they made the right decision to move to closing arguments,” he told CNN. “I don’t know that they would have lost votes, I just am pretty confident they were at their high watermark yesterday morning. I know that [among the] Senate Republican caucus, I can’t figure out who their eighth or ninth vote was going to be.“Donald Trump’s going to be in charge of their party for the next four years. As they were deathly afraid of him for the last four years, they are going to continue to be afraid of him for the next four years.”Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana senator who was among the Republican dissidents, expanded on his reasoning for his vote after declaring on Saturday it was simply “because [Trump] is guilty”.“We can see the president for two months after the election promoting that the election was stolen,” he told ABC. “He scheduled the rally for 6 January, just when the transfer of power was to take place. And even after he knew there was violence taking place, he continued to basically sanction the mob being there. And not until later did he actually ask them to leave.”Cassidy said he was unconcerned by a backlash in Louisiana, where the state GOP has censured him and the chair of the Republican caucus warned him not to expect a warm welcome back.“I have the privilege of having the facts before me and being able to spend several days deeply going into those facts,” he said.“As these facts become more and more out there, and folks have a chance to look for themselves, more will move to where I was. People want to trust their leaders, they want people to be held accountable.” More

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      Keir Starmer can learn much from Joe Biden’s first weeks | Letters

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      I read Andy Beckett’s column (Think bigger: that’s the message for Starmer from Biden’s bold beginning, 11 February) with interest and a certain amount of agreement. Joe Biden has hit the White House floor running with his overturning of Donald Trump’s divisive issues and, indeed, confounding some of his critics. I feel, too, that Keir Starmer needs to take a leaf out of his presidential book, because it is not just enough to be “the grown up” in the chamber at prime minister’s questions. He needs to be radical and persuasive. I used to relish his forensic questioning but now find it slightly stale and predictable.He has real capabilities of forging the party into a fighting and vigorous entity, and not one to appeal to just one demographic. Biden is proving to be quite radical and forward thinking. Starmer needs behave in a similar manner before the public simply forgets all the government’s mistakes with the pandemic and just centres on the great success of the vaccine rollout. So please, Sir Keir, harness your inner passions and go for it, without weighing up all the pros and cons first. Judith A Daniels Great Yarmouth, Norfolk• Andy Beckett is right to encourage the new Labour leadership to “think bigger”. But the real lesson from the US is the way in which the existing political system handicaps parties of the centre-left.So Labour needs to work with other progressive parties to show how the necessary supply of public goods – health, housing, education, social care, social security, infrastructure – cannot be obtained without changes to the political system: ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote can actually do so; introducing some form of proportional representation so that no one is deprived of a vote by where they live; placing limits on private political funding; and introducing much tighter control over the veracity of political claims and statements.This is the “bigger picture” that Labour needs to draw if there is to be any hope of another genuinely progressive government. Prof Roger BrownSouthampton• If we can learn anything from Joe Biden’s success, it is that a principled, centre-left man of integrity could be exactly what the population of the UK so badly needs. What we do not need is a populist masquerading as a committed politician, but who cannot unite the Labour party, let alone the country. Jeremy Corbyn was more inclined to alienate the core of the centre-left.Beckett rightly pairs Trump with Boris Johnson but, weirdly, chooses to call them charismatic! It may well be that Keir Starmer, whose integrity, intelligence and competence are indeed what Labour needs, will readily follow Biden’s values of “family, community and security”. What, after all, is the alternative? Boris Johnson? A man who has publicly praised Donald Trump and whose values would appear to fall short of those espoused by Biden and Starmer. Carolyn Kirton Aberdeen• I have to disagree with Andy Beckett when he credits the “surge” in leftwing politics in the US with Donald Trump’s defeat. While acknowledging the professional and pragmatic approach taken by the Democrats in their campaign both for the White House and Congress, it was clearly the damage wrought by Covid to the US economy, as well as the ensuing loss of life and its exposure of the inadequacies and downright incompetence of Trump and his ragbag administration, that gave Joe Biden and his party the ultimate victory. John Marriott Lincoln More

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      Convicted or not, Trump is history – it's Biden who's changing America | Robert Reich

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      While most of official Washington has been focused on the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.Congress is moving ahead with Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands healthcare and unemployment benefits and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.Trump has left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The party is imploding. Since the Capitol attack on 6 January, growing numbers of voters have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression.Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverishedImportantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation big government was the problem.The first is the supposed omnipresent danger of inflation and the accompanying worry that public spending can easily overheat the economy.Rubbish. Inflation hasn’t reared its head in years, not even during the roaring job market of 2018 and 2019. “Overheating” may no longer even be a problem for globalized, high-tech economies whose goods and services are so easily replaceable.Biden’s ambitious plans are worth the small risk, in any event. If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is becoming more unequal by the day. Bringing it to a boil may be the only way to lift the wages of the bottom half. The hope is that record low interest rates and vast public spending generate enough demand that employers will need to raise wages to find the workers they need.A few Democratic economists who should know better are sounding the false alarm about inflation, but Biden is wisely ignoring them. So should Democrats in Congress.Another conservative bromide is that a larger national debt crowds out private investment and slows growth. This view hamstrung the Clinton and Obama administrations as deficit hawks warned against public spending unaccompanied by tax increases to pay for it. (I still have some old injuries inflicted by those hawks.)Fortunately, Biden isn’t buying this, either.Four decades of chronic underemployment and stagnant wages have shown how important public spending is for sustained growth. Not incidentally, growth reduces the debt as a share of the overall economy. The real danger is the opposite: fiscal austerity shrinks economies and causes national debts to grow in proportion.The third canard is that generous safety nets discourage work.Democratic presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity with broad-based relief. But after Reagan tied public assistance to racism – deriding single-mother “welfare queens” – conservatives began demanding stringent work requirements so that only the “truly deserving” received help. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acquiesced to this nonsense.Not Biden. His proposal would not only expand jobless benefits but also provide assistance to parents who are not working, thereby extending relief to 27 million children, including about half of all Black and Latino children. Republican senator Mitt Romney of Utah has put forward a similar plan.This is just common sense. Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverished, according to the most recent census data.The pandemic has also caused a large number of women to drop out of the labor force in order to care for children. With financial help, some will be able to pay for childcare and move back into paid work. After Canada enacted a national child allowance in 2006, employment rates for mothers increased. A decade later, when Canada increased its annual child allowance, its economy added jobs.It’s still unclear exactly what form Biden’s final plans will take as they work their way through Congress. He has razor-thin majorities in both chambers. In addition, most of his proposals are designed for the current emergency; they would need to be made permanent.But the stars are now better aligned for fundamental reform than they have been since Reagan.It’s no small irony that a half-century after Reagan persuaded Americans big government was the problem, Trump’s demise is finally liberating America from Reaganism – and letting the richest nation on earth give its people the social support they desperately need. More

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      in Elections

      Failure to convict Trump in impeachment trial will live as a 'vote of infamy', says Schumer – video

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      The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, decried the decision to acquit Donald Trump of inciting a riot at the US Capitol on 6 January. House Democrats, who voted a month ago to charge Trump with ‘incitement of insurrection’, needed two thirds of the Senate, or 67 votes, to convict him. Only seven Republicans joined all 50 Democrats in voting to convict Trump.
      The Democrats argued in the short trial that Trump caused the violent attack by repeating for months the false claims that the election was stolen from him, and then telling his supporters gathered near the White House that morning to ‘fight like hell’ to overturn his defeat. Five people died when they then laid siege to the Capitol.
      Senate has officially voted to acquit Trump on 57-43 vote More

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      Five Republicans join vote for witnesses in Trump Senate trial – video

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      Five Senate Republicans voted with the Democrats on Saturday, that the Senate should call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
      Before the 55-45 vote, Trump’s impeachment lawyer Michael van der Veen warned senators that if Democrats wished to call a witness, he would ask for at least 100 witnesses and insist they give depositions in person in his office in Philadelphia – a threat that prompted laughter from the chamber.
      Impeachment: five Republicans join vote for witnesses in Trump Senate trial More